The storage of textual material in memory retained databases has expanded and continues to expand to an extent wherein accessing the information content of a given data base may represent an overwhelming complexity. Historically, data base management systems have attempted to organize information into some manageable order, looking to hierarchical, networked and relational structures which hopefully are searchable with respect to some attribute or combination of attributes. Notwithstanding such efforts, as the size and complexity of the many data bases has grown, conventional search engines tend to locate either too much or too little information. For instance, employing key words at the commencement of a search may result in failure for a number of reasons. The documents representing a textual data base typically are the product of diverse individuals with their own selections and patterns, for example, as may be manifested in resume related data bases. Terms employed by practitioners in the technical world often change over time and the vocabularies involved in those endeavors will be added to. As a consequence, the text discussion concerning a technical subject in an early document may only marginally resemble the text discussion of that same subject in a later document. Groups or individuals endeavoring in a specific technical endeavor who are unaware of each other may evolve their own unique different descriptors for the same technical element. Where a search calls for a combination of attributes not present in any one document of the data base, it may fail inasmuch as conventional searching procedures generally are incapable of finding information which is “close”.
Conjuring a searching rule at the outset of a search, unless profoundly simplistic, typically will be unrealistic. In this regard a workable rule must be formulated based on the content of the database draft.
In general, the more significant problem associated with obtaining desired information from a modern textual data base is not so much concerned with the search engine at hand. The problem resides in formulating the question to be asserted to the search engine to find reasonably relevant result candidates. Once those candidates are found, the searcher must be able to quickly and efficiently evaluate the various document candidates evolved in the search without undue reading efforts. Typical search systems are so question-dependant that many documents will be excluded even though they may contain at least some information sought by the searcher.